ber, I lived as often as not in prison
for what I had done in liquor. It was when he was nearly twenty that
the change came; for he began to bring home money, do you see? and what
with his work and the way he talked to me, I set myself to get the
craving under; and I was a new man in one year, and in two my brain
came back to me, and I made the discovery that I was not born a fool.
You may reckon I worshipped the lad! God knows, he and his mother did
for me more than man or woman ever did for a breathing body. And when
my wits came back to me, and I thought what I might have done, and what
I had done, and that my boy had borne it all only to drag me to my
reason at last, I could have ended it there and then. Maybe I should
have done it if a new turn hadn't come in my life's road. It was when I
was at my lowest, and we were sore put to it to get food in New York,
that I was taken up by a man who was going to Michigan seeking copper.
My lad was then working with a Mike Leveston in the city--a land-agent
for the up-country work, and the owner of a line of small brigs running
between Boston and the Bahamas; but times had gone bad with him, and
the boy, who had been getting good money, found himself with no more
than enough to keep him, let alone his mother. Well, I thought the
thing out, and, as my partner had some capital and agreed to let me
have ten dollars a week any way, I made an agreement with Leveston that
he should allow the wife and the boy enough to live on for six months,
and I set out for the State where the copper find was beginning to
attract notice, and in a year I was a made man. We found the ore as
thick as clay, and, under the excitement of it, I kept my head, and the
drink craze never touched me. When the money came in, I made Leveston
my New York agent, and sent him enough to set up the woman who'd stood
by me all through in more luxury than she'd known since she married me.
For awhile her letters told me of her new life, and I kept them under
my shirt as I would have kept leaves of gold. In the spring, I sent the
agent twenty thousand dollars for her; and I got his acknowledgment,
saying she'd gone down to Charleston to see about the boy's work there,
and I should hear from her on her return.

"I think this was about eighteen months after I left New York, and from
that time my wife ceased to write to me, and I heard nothing more from
the lad. We'd been doing such work in the mine that we had enough mone